Mass extinction is accelerating due to human-driven climate change, resource consumption, and destruction of other species. The deeper problem is a worldview that equates happiness and development with endless consumption. Science itself is not the problem; without inner clarity, its immense power becomes destructive. Advaita points to a different relationship with the world, where it is not an object of exploitation but a means to deepen self-understanding and inner development.
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Questioner: When you say mass extinction, what do you really mean? We were just a few years ago, we were 6 billion people. Now we are 8 billion people. I mean, we've been continuously growing. What is mass extinction?
Acharya Prashant: There is a certain natural rate at which species go extinct every day. So, there is a rate. That rate has increased by almost a thousand times in the last hundred years. Even as we have been speaking over the last hour or so, thousands of species have gone extinct in just this time slot. I'm not talking of individual members of those species being lost. I'm talking of entire species disappearing forever. That's what is happening, and that's happening because of reasons that are man-made, anthropogenic.
So, we have raised the average temperature of this planet by 1.5° centigrade, and the temperature is increasing at an increasing rate. The carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere should naturally be around 280 PPM. It has shot up to around 450 PPM now, and all that has happened only in the last 5,200 years.
